Services

Design is a tricky industry. Everyone has an opinion and just about everyone thinks they can either do it themselves or get their niece to do it for pennies on the dollar. It gets even more confusing when template resources are so easily accessible covering just about every type of design project whether it be simple business cards or a complete website. Truth is, a professional designer that respects their clientele will always be a far greater value than spending a couple hundred on a cookie-cutter website that does nothing to reflect the client’s values nor provides any assistance when problems or special adjustments are inevitably encountered.

Analysis

Every project starts with discussion and evaluation. The most important component to a project is to identify its goals. Why does a website, brochure, or game exist in the first place? What does it need to do to satisfy that purpose and does it actually meet that objective.

Whether redesigning an existing site that isn’t living up to the client’s expectations or starting from scratch, a thoughtful discussion is always the first priority. It establishes the complexity of the project and gives everyone a fair expectation of what the final product will be. Analysis is about identifying what elements work and improving those that don’t. It’s about stripping the fat of fancy buzzwords and trimming down to the pieces that keep those goals at the forefront.

Planning

Planning is far too often overlooked, even by the larger design firms that charge for more. For such expensive charges, you’d think you’d get what you pay for. Planning, like Analysis, is an essential step before any design works ever takes place. Often a design house will meet with a client, get a feel for what they’re project is, then ignore most of what the client said and come up with a few one page designs where the client is supposed to choose one, and the developer is supposed to bring the whole thing to life.

Time spent on proper planning before hand, saves time later when unexpected problems are encountered down the road. It actually reduces the number of those encounters by predicting when and where they will occur. For the most part, planning is all about developing a simple roadmap that demonstrates “what will happen when a user clicks this button.” It’s about designing for the user experience making it as easy and intuitive as possible all the while keeping the projects goals at the forefront so that they don’t get lost later in the clutter of rapid design ideas.

Design

Everything a designer does is really about communication. From the client brief and interpreting what a client is looking for to transcribing those ideas to a visual design that the end user understands. Good design understands the relationship between elements on the page. It understands and executes the basic ideas of color, pattern, space, and proximity. The objective is to take everything learned in the Analysis phase and create a styleguide that can be applied to every element that was identified in the Planning phase which will be passed onto Development where the final product can be built without any question as to what goes where. This is the Process working in harmony. Every phase coming together to meet one goal: The client’s success.

The process of design, like communication, is a two-way street. One person’s ideas and vision may not mesh with another’s. Design is about intelligent compromise; making the best decisions that satisfy not only the client’s desires but also make an effective user experience. The design phase focuses on collaborating with the client and creating a product that they can identify with.

It also goes beyond a simple one page template. Web design especially is dynamic and can change from page to page. Proper planning and design accounts for both large and small differences so that there’s no haphazard guesswork when it comes time for development. It’s often said that “the Devil is in the details.” You could also say, “God is in the details,” for its in the details that a design can be lost or won. Small inconsistencies, a single broken link, leaving out that “extra touch” can easily keep a design from reaching greatness. Yet, paying attention to those details, designing every element so that if you were to remove it from the design and make it stand on its own, you could still get a sense of the product it came from, keeping size, color and spacing consistent. These are the things that allow excellent works to standout among the rest.

Development & Testing

While design is visual the complete user experience is much more. Development is all about taking a design and bringing it to life.